The Household COO

During our very brief visit to Shanghai, the hubby and I discovered one very important point of note - don’t bother eating at the airport unless you are starving.  Yes.  It is THAT bad.  Not only that, it is very expensive for food that is terrible.

We woke up early on Sunday morning and got our bags packed.  After taking a quick look at the buffet spread at the hotel, we decided to delay gratifying our stomachs and check out the food selection at the airport.  I swear my mind had been conjuring up images of Shanghai dumplings and various other delectable Dim Sum dishes.

In our haste to get to the airport, we forgot that we were too early to check-in.  Taking a walk to the back of the airport revealed little.  We assumed the restaurants must have been located near the departure lounges.  Returning to the check-in queue, we waited and waited and waited and waited.  The staff refused to open the counters to let us check-in, instead they went about their social chit-chatting and pointedly ignored us.

The hubby, by this time, was fuming.  He never did have much patience on an empty stomach.  When they finally opened their counters, we found ourselves traipsing all the way to the other end of the airport to get to our boarding gate.  Once inside, we discovered that there wasn’t much duty-free shopping to look at, nor was there a terribly good choice of cuisine available - definitely no Shanghai dumplings or Dim Sum.

My fried rice was disappointingly “underwhelming” and the hubby’s noodles little better.  By the time we were served our lunch on the flight, the hubby was so hungry that he gobbled down the aeroplane food as though it was the best tasted food he had ever come across.

Based on this short experience, I’m not sure that the hubby is too keen to revisit Shanghai again.

Sometime during my pregnancy, my brother told me he was getting married and that the wedding was going to be held in Shanghai. The hubby and I thought we would take this great opportunity to extend our trip and take a little holiday around Shanghai since neither of us had ever been there.

That was before Gavin was born. Of course everything changed after he was born. For instance, we totally underestimated the power of our son’s call to us. After he was born, the idea of leaving him behind while we went off on a holiday suddenly seemed too unbearable. As a result, we cut our four day holiday to an overnight trip where we would just attend my brother’s wedding and fly back ASAP.

Even then, we thought we might at least get a chance to see a little of Shanghai before we had to leave. Here are the three photos I took from our trip that were not related to the wedding:

Above: Hubby and Mom walking out to the hair salon where Mom and I got our hair done for the wedding.

Above: Another shot of Mom and Hubby - you can see a part of the Sofitel Hotel where we stayed at behind them. I did take another photo of the Hotel with the revolving restaurant at the top but I had to delete the photo because silly me forgot to download the previous photos on my memory card before we left so I had very limited spare memory on my camera for the wedding photos.

Above: a telephone card machine at Shanghai airport that I took using my mobile phone camera. It was meant to be one of those shots for “English bloopers”. If you take note that they spelt “automatically” as “automatially”. Even if you assume that they simply missed printing the letter “c”, the grammar is still incorrect.

Yup, a trip to Shanghai and all we saw was the airport, the hotel and a hair salon.

The weekend came and went and just like that, my brother’s wedding was over. I still find it amazing how much planning is involved in a wedding only for it to be over before you know it.

I don’t know if this was a typical wedding by Shanghai standards since it is the first one I have ever been privy to but it was certainly very different from mine. Regrettably, I didn’t get a chance to take photos leading up to the main event in the evening because the hubby and I took a very short overnighter. We arrived in Shanghai with enough time to visit to the hair salon, attend the dinner and taste some rather mediocre breakfast at the airport before flying back home to our son.

I’m afraid I took some rather horrid pictures from the wedding. Ordinarily I would have snapped so many photos I would have had to have some good shots. Since I stupidly forgot to download my old photos, I had limited memory to play with. Even so I’m quite surprised how badly my photos turned out. Luckily KH was there to play unofficial photographer so I’ll wait until he sends me the DVD copy from his camera before I post up the full details of the wedding.

In the mean time, here’s a sneak peek of the wedding dinner: